As Voice over Internet Protocol communication matures and as high-speed Internet becomes cheap and ubiquitous, an increasing number of businesses are ditching conventional landlines and jumping to VoIP. Companies are not only marketing products or services, but marketing themselves as well. No matter the size or type, every business should have the tools and solutions needed to present themselves in a professional manner, while maximizing their ability to work efficiently and stay connected to customers and co-workers.

While some small businesses may believe they can get by with simply using their smartphones for work purposes, even the smallest of businesses can benefit from a central business phone system, because it presents a unified face to customers, employees and partners.

Are the potential pitfalls worth the potential monetary payoffs? I’ll walk you through the basics, discuss the pros and cons, and take a look at three commercial VoIP services of varying complexity.

While it may be intuitive, mobile phone plans are simply not set up to offer the same business features that specifically designed business phone systems offer. For example, mobile phones can’t offer a virtual receptionist to answer calls and quickly and easily connect customers with the proper company contacts, or provide important business information like hours and directions.

Generally, things are pretty simple if you’re looking for a hosted service. Many of the top VoIP providers handle all the heavy lifting offsite, delivering calls to your phones and software clients without much hassle, especially if you use phones that are plug-and-play certified for the service in question. The majority require no additional on-site hardware aside from those phones; at most, you might need to find a space for a small box of hardware somewhere on-site.

In contrast, maintaining a self-hosted, on-site VoIP system requires a bit more work. You need an IP-based private branch exchange-a VoIP-friendly version of the PBX phone systems that many offices use-to route your calls to the appropriate phones on your network, as well as a device called a PSTN gateway. The PSTN gateway sits between the IP-PBX software and the analog signals of the public switched telephone network, converting calls to and from digital signals as necessary.

No matter which option you choose, typically you can handle the basic settings for your phone lines or extensions over the phone, while tweaking more advanced options requires diving into your provider’s online account interface.

What Do You Need to Implement VoIP?

Depending on the size of your company and the infrastructure you already have in place, jumping on the VoIP bandwagon could cost your company next to nothing, or it could entail significant up-front costs.
Even home broadband connections can handle several VoIP calls simultaneously, though you’ll need to be sure to leave bandwidth available for other applications as well.VoIP requires a broadband connection-and the more simultaneous users you have, the more bandwidth you’ll need. If you work alone out of a home office, or if you have only a few employees, you won’t have much to worry about; for example, on my setup, running RingCentral’s Conection Capacity utility shows that my 15-mbps home Comcast connection could handle 11 calls simultaneously even if I had Netflix, Spotify, and an instant-messaging client running on the network at the same time.

Make sure that your internal network-including your routers and switches-can handle the load, too. Most providers suggest using a router with configurable Quality of Service settings and assigning VoIP high traffic priority to maximize quality.

If your Internet service provider has a bandwidth cap in place, you should take that into consideration as well. Most VoIP service providers use the high-quality G.711 codec for VoIP communications, which consumes 64kb of data every second you talk. In reality, even a large number of people should be able to chat it up on VoIP without having to worry about hitting bandwidth caps, but you’ll want to keep close tabs on your data usage to avoid exceeding that cap.

You’ll need a SIP-enabled phone, such as the Snom 300, if you want to make VoIP calls.Finally, even if you subscribe to a cloud-based hosted VoIP service, you’ll need to make sure your phones can communicate over VoIP. Most VoIP systems use session-initiation protocol technology to assign each phone or VoIP software client a specific address; that’s how the IP-PBX routes calls to specific lines. As such, you’ll need a SIP-enabled phone to make VoIP calls. (Some VoIP systems use H.323 technology rather than SIP, but those are rare.) If you want to keep your old analog touch-tone phones or fax machines, you can plug them into an analog telephone adapter (ATA), but they won’t be able to use many of the advanced features that SIP-based VoIP phones provide.

According to digital marketing experts only one in five organizations are good in digital marketing. Lack of innovation and dearth of value-added thinking are challenged which organizations need to address and optimizing their digital operations remains a high priority.

The average marketing budget will increase by 6.3 % in 2013 – as per Aberdeen Business review (Aug, 2012). So where will marketing spend this budget in 2013? In most of the cases this can be a tricky question. However the most likely answer is that marketing will spend in whatever’s working. Best in class organizations are setting the pace for establishing consistent, measureable lead management processes, establishing marketing and sales alignment and systematic tracking marketing revenue performances. The need of the hour is expanding the utilization of marketing automation systems. Revenue Performance Management capabilities like a process to define ROI on marketing, cost of customer acquisition, and closed loop reporting which gives marketers ability to optimize lead management processes are being rapidly adopted. More and more companies have began to integrate social media with their demand generation and customer acquisition programs, the trend is that companies use social as a signal for lead scoring and content personalization.

As content marketing capabilities continue to mature, companies need to become more strategic in their implementation of content marketing. They need to align content to the buyer’s journey and measure its impact. Today’s dynamic marketing environments make it certain that marketers need to have much greater control on the content. As digital marketing experts try to understand how to transition to modern content marketing, the data gained from granular metrics is invaluable in a transition that meets the demand generation requirements of the business.

In order to overcome the challenges in managing the overall digital experience, marketers should think about their owned digital channels as a part of a unified marketing system – which is comprised of multiple best of breed digital platforms for web content management, marketing automation, CRM etc. All the platforms and technology should talk to each other as part of an integrated digital solution.

How to leverage an integrated digital solution:

The closed loop engagement cycle is the model used to gain customer understanding:

´ Use analytics and forms to capture behavior and profile

´ Analyze the customer context

´ Package the content to align with the customer context

Use the buying cycle to understand how, when and with what to engage prospects at each step of buying process:

´ Understand your customer’s mindset through the buying cycle journey

´ Determine the target groups within your audience

´ Understand and align the messages with the segment and their objections

´ Integrated the three platforms to get a common view of the customer across all channels

´ Both web CMS and marketing automation enable marketers to define rules that govern what content is displayed in a context

´ Automate the engagement cycle

´ Nurture leads through the buying cycle to the point at which they are ready for sales

´ Deliver leads that are ready to engage with the sales team

Moreover as the dynamic of the digital marketing is continuously evolving, the digital solution must rely on user feedback and data analytics to adjust your message to fit the ever-changing demands of each segment of your target audience.

When talking about business related issues, solutions, and technologies, you will almost always group businesses as small and large. While the separation is there, it won’t be wrong to say that in a modern where digital technologies prevail, it should not be a problem for small businesses to compete with large ones. The large corporations have the advantage of having more resources without a doubt. However, there was not a time in the past when growing and expanding was as easy for small businesses as it is today.

Digital Marketing for Everyone

Digital marketing starts with a website today. When it comes to website designs, more money does not always mean a better design. If you are working with the right people and are clear about your requirements, your website can be just as impressive as the website of a large business. In fact, internet users today are more in favor of simplistic websites with a focus on the information they are looking for rather than the glitter and sparkle.

As for social media marketing, there is no difference in the size of the market that small and large businesses have to target. They are both targeting global audiences and how good they are at it is not defined by how much money they put in their marketing efforts. Social media marketing is free marketing, so there is no excuse as to who has more resources.

And if you believe that the large corporations make it to the top of the search engine results, you always have a better and more effective niche to compete within – local. With local search engine optimization, small businesses can compete with the medium and large businesses head to head. In simple words, regardless of the size of the business, everyone has access to the same market and same people today. What matters is who does it better.

Digital Solutions Are Available Specifically for Small Businesses

When it comes to software solutions for businesses, the focus is not on large corporations anymore. Today, all types of software solutions have their versions built specifically for small businesses. These digital solutions allow small businesses to cut down their costs and make use of the same technologies that large companies are using.

Take the example of CRMs. At one point, there was a notion that customer relationship management software are only for large businesses, but the things have changed quite a bit today. Web-based CRM are a revelation for small businesses. First, these CRMs provide great marketing, database, customer service and sales solutions to the businesses. Second, they are unbelievably affordable. If you own a small business, you don’t even have to worry about software integration, hardware compatibility, updates, and upgrades, etc. Keep in mind that with in-house solutions, these are the costs that make it difficult for small businesses to grow financially.

With web-based solutions designed for small businesses, you can now have access to a world-class CRM at a fractional monthly or yearly cost. Other affordable digital solutions available include invoicing software, bookkeeping software, payroll software, etc.

Customers Have the Power in Hands

The Internet has empowered customers like never before. You can’t say that just because a business is in multiple countries, it will be impressive enough for people to buy its products. The amazing thing about today’s economy is the power that customers have in their hands. Online reviewing websites, YouTube videos, blogs, etc. are among many platforms that allow customers to know more about businesses. In fact, even Google now puts business ratings and customer reviews right within its search results.

What this means is that when a customer searches for a business today, he/she is already able to see the reputation of the product they are going to buy. Furthermore, negative reviews from customers can greatly affect the sales of business, giving other businesses a chance to make their name.

Furthermore, it’s not just the quality of products that matters today. In the modern world, businesses are competing for better customer experience. If your business can give customers the experience they are looking for, your growth is inevitable despite the small size of your business.

Funding Is No Issue for Startups

It is always the starting days that matter the most for business. When you are a startup, you are looking for ways to fund your business so you can materialize your idea and polish your product/service according to the requirements of the customers. Finding a platform where you could connect with investors was a challenge in the past. This is not an issue anymore.

With like our websites, it is easier than ever for small businesses to get in touch with investors and get the right amount of investment that sets them on the path of growth. These are websites that act as a bridge between investors from all around the world and startups. With traditional banks and lenders, you are only limited to a local audience of investors. When you can’t find an investor in your local market, your hopes are almost dead.

With online funding websites, all you have to do is create a convincing pitch that explains the viability of your startup to the investors and its scope. Your pitch along with all the necessary information that you think investors should see goes on the website where it is visible to hundreds and thousands of investors. If you have done your homework and have a team of right professionals on board, getting the right investment is just a matter of hours or days.

Final Words

You can see that a small business can overcome almost all of their challenges much more efficiently today. Starting a business has become so easy that even students can be entrepreneurs today. They can lay the foundation for a business using just their pocket money. From connecting with the right investors to cutting down operational costs, all can be done from the comfort of a person’s home. The only thing that makes the difference today is if you are confident enough to take the first step.